We are definitely facing a government showdown, but will there be a shutdown?
Republicans (at least most of them) are in an epic battle with President Obama over defunding ObamaCare, and want to use the federal budget or the government’s debt limit as leverage for the fight. If the two sides fail to come to an agreement in the next few days, we could see a government shutdown.
Since the last shutdown was 18 years ago, people tend to think of it as a rare occurrence. Actually, government shutdowns—or “funding gaps,” as the government more accurately refers to them because it continues to fund “essential services”—used to be a regular event, even when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House.
According to the Congressional Research Service, there have been 17 federal shutdowns in U.S. history: six during the Jimmy Carter’s four years, eight during Ronald Reagan’s eight years, one for George H.W. Bush, and two for Clinton.
The shutdowns lasted much longer during the Carter years than the Reagan years, when he had a Democratic Congress. Carter’s longest shutdown was for 17 days, between September and October 1978, and his shortest (two of them) were eight days, both in 1977. Reagan’s were all between one and three days, with a shutdown every year except for 1985 and 1988.
Bush 41’s only shutdown lasted three days. And note: it was Democrats who ran both houses of Congress with a Republican president.
The longest shutdown in history was on Bill Clinton’s watch. It lasted 21 days—Dec. 16, 1995, to Jan. 6, 1996, during the scaled-down holiday season—and was widely perceived as a PR disaster for Republicans.
There is currently an effort to claim that Republicans actually benefited from that ’96 shutdown because they picked up some Senate seats that year. But no one at the time perceived it as a Republican win, which is why so many oppose a shutdown now.
It is also important to note that nearly all of the shutdowns took place around the government’s fiscal new year, October 1, as a result of budget battles.
So there is nothing new about a government shutdown over a budget battle, and at times it was Democrats who were willing to shut it down to get their way.